Brand Integrity recruits Bond for president's post

By TROY L. SMITH - 1/25/2013

Brand Integrity Inc. has bolstered its management team, part of a plan to double employment in the next few years.

Bryan Bond is slated to become the company's president on Feb. 4. He previously served as president of Bond Financial Network Inc., a Pittsford-based employee benefits consulting firm that was a Rochester Top 100 company in 2011.

Based in Rochester, Brand Integrity provides consulting and software offerings to help companies align their goals with employee behaviors and engage employees to share best practices.

Gregg Lederman, founder and CEO, said Brand Integrity has grown its revenues at least 20 percent annually for several years. The company has 20 employees and plans to add 15 to 20 people within the next two years, he said.

Brand Integrity added six employees in 2012. Among them was Terry Owen, who became senior vice president of sales in August.

Before joining Brand Integrity, Owen was vice president of sales for ITX Corp. He also spent nine years as president of LogicalSolutions.net Inc., which merged with ITX in 2010. Lederman said Owen will play an important role in growing Brand Integrity's client base.

For his part, Bond said Brand Integrity's mission drew him. He sold his shares of Bond Financial to his brother, Erick Bond, in October and began looking for a new career path. He met Patrick Ahern, senior vice president of business development for Brand Integrity, at a networking event in November and was hooked.

"I've had experience with big companies and small companies," Bond said. "The one thing that was consistent in the success of those companies was building a culture that differentiates. With Brand Integrity, I'm really looking forward to exploring more broadly on how to do that."

Lederman said Bond's experience and skill set will help solidify the operations and client base at Brand Integrity, the company Lederman founded in 2002 after an unfulfilling stint in the advertising business.

"I couldn't understand why companies would market a brand with a complete disregard for whether or not their employees would actually live it," Lederman said. "I found that very few organizations focused on how to get employees to live the brand and bring those promises to life."

Lederman said he started Brand Integrity vowing never to offer any marketing services, despite a name that might suggest otherwise, and to work only with organizations committed to changing the way people interact with the mission of their brand.

The bulk of Brand Integrity's initial work was consulting. Things evolved in 2005 with the creation of Potential Point LLC, which Lederman formed with Frederick Beer.

Beer was a co-founder of Auragen Communications Inc., one of Rochester's original Web development firms. With Potential Point he created a software tool that could fulfill Lederman's vision.

The two companies eventually merged. Beer moved on and now is president of ITX.

In 2009, Brand Integrity unveiled a more advanced version of its product, called Potential Point Employee Engagement Solution. It was a combination of Web-based software and services that could capture data on employee behavior using an offline or Web-based tool. The data could then be analyzed and shared with employees to educate and improve performance.

Lederman and his team have continued to develop Potential Point. The latest version has real-time employee experience and customer feedback data in a cloud-based format, eliminating the need for hardware or software installation. The company still offers consulting and training services designed around Potential Point.

"These guys have spent the last several years in this transition from consulting to software," Bond said. "Now they can be confident that what they've built actually works. It's a great foundation from which to grow."

Lederman said 99 percent of Brand Integrity's revenues come from existing clients buying and using more solutions from the software platform. The company's client list includes the University of Rochester, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield and Five Star Bank.

"As the software development has moved forward, we've focused on growing the usage of it by our existing clients," Lederman said. "We've spent the better part of the last three years using more of the software features as they come out. Now we can scale this up and bring on new clients."